Creating and revising patterns with selected sound material can get pretty technical. And so can sound editing software: consider the excessive analytical reasoning, the “logos vertigo,” induced by powerful and useful--but often counter-intuitive--programs such as Audacity or Fruity Loops. Stacking tracks and patterning grids can get complicated, and quick. Still, these rhetorical processes begin with simple gestures: selecting/deselecting information, mixing the results with more selected/deselected information, pressing play, and, crucially, listening back. What of the phenomenology of listening for information adepts working with sound in a digital medium?
This screen shot, taken in Audacity, shows the image-of-sound common to DAWs, an image derived from Helmholz' famous tuning fork experiment. These softwares combnine visual and sonic domains for grokking the procedures common to informatic arts and sciences in diverse contexts: selecting/telescoping/microscoping, cutting, shuffling, troping. The efficiency and speed by which information adepts can select, mix, and render novelty in digital media, however, can in itself become over-metrical, entropic.
Back when I was a child, before DAWS, would-be scientists could find the rhetoric of this interface and image in books like Martin Keen's Let's Experiment: Over 150 Safe, Easy Experiments for Junior Scientists to Perform at Home. Here's a sample:
"Sound travels through a medium in the form of waves. Let us take sound traveling through air as an example. When a vibrating object, say the prong of a tuning fork, moves in one direction, it pushes the air next to itself, a little farther out from the vibrating prong. The crowding motion that moves farther and farether out from the vibrating object is called a compression waves" (Let's Experiment: Over 150 Safe, Easy Experiments for Junior Scientists to Perform at Home, written by Martin L. Keen, special consultant: Dr. William Van Houten, illustrated by: Walter Ferguson, Anthony Tallarico, George J. Zaffo, design, layout, and editorial Production by Donald D. Wolf and Margot L. Wolf)
Say more about this, sample from experiment, placeholder for Helmoltz workup. fq.
Then, there's the other side of the oscillation:
"While the vibrating prong of a tuning fork compresses the air on one side of itself, it pulls away form the air on the other side and leaves an empty space. The adjacent air begins to rush into this empty space. The place of this inrushing air is taken by the air a little farther out, which, in turn, leaves an empty space behind itself. ANd the empty space moves outward from the moving prong in the same manner as the compression wave. Although we have said that the space behind the moving prong is empty, actually, it is not entirely without air. Rather, the air in this space is much thinner, or rarer, than air normally is. This zone of rarefied air, moving farther and farther out from a vibrating object, is called a rarefaction wave. (Let's Experiment 47).
Following this rhetoric of sound and image, and directing the DAWs magnification feature on the magnification tool/trope in digital audio workstations themselves, one reaches a limit: zero. To make an effective cut, the best technique is to take the resolution all the way to what DAW programmers call "unity," where the rhetor/musician can get in-between the sampling rate itself, where there is "no-sound":
From "logos-vertigo"...to Logos?
"The ear favors no particular 'point of view." WE are enveloped by sound. It forms a seamless web around us. We say, 'Music shall fill the air,' We never say , 'Music shall fill a particular segment of the air.'
We hear sounds from everywhere, without ever having to focus, Sounds come from 'above,' from 'below,' from in 'front' of us, from 'behind' us, from our 'right,' from our 'left.' We can't shut out sound automatically. We simply are not equipped with earlids. Where a visual space is an organized continum of a uniformed connected kind, the ear is world of simultaneous relationships" (McLuan and Fiore The Medium is the Massage).
Hearing?
The "Logos" is an idea that defies definition, even as it is the fountainhead of much, much exegesis in many, many textual traditions. In an essay called "Logos," Martin Heidegger approaches this concept by means of Heraclitus' Fragment B 50. Most translations are "nearly identical," and so the sample he provides, the philosopher reasons, matters not much. Like Nietzsche, he seeks to enchant his readers by insisting that ontological ground of Greek thought is lost, inaccessible to modernity. This attitude conditions these philosophers' manner of approaching ancient the shards/samples of absence/presence that have been preserved, but only in fragmented form. Heidegger selects Snell's translation, which, according to the treatment that follows, despite what he has said, somehow differ somewhat from the bulk of translations in that it does not rely on the term "Logos":
When you have listened not to me but to the Meaning,
it is wise within the same Meaning to say: One is All (Snell)
Most translations look more like this:
Listening not to me but to the Logos, it is wise to say, in accordance with the Logos: all is one.
The theory of the Logos, of course, repetitiously threads through many traditions.
This user-friendly site compiles all known fragments attributed to Heraclitus, and quick search will demonstrate that the Logos appears in more than one fragment.
The etymological trace of the Logos that Heidegger decides to amplify here takes the Latin "legere" (to gather) into consideration, and the philosopher proceeds to explain how a sense of "gathering together" prevails. Also, in the middle voice, "to lay oneself down in the gathering of rest" (Early Greek Thinking 60). And yet, "all the same it remains incontestable that" the Greek term commonly translated as Logos that is under consideration here "means, predominantly if not exclusively, saying and talking" (61). This sort of "saying" somehow brings together scattered elements, and properly means "the laying-down and laying-before which gathers itself and others," which brings this sense of saying pretty close to most common etymologies of the word "religion."
After much definitional work establishing these and other nuances inherent in saying as "a letting-lie-together-before which gathers and is gathered,"Heidegger turns to the corresponding hearing attendant to such an understanding of the concept at the kernel of Fragment B 50. It follows that hearing is not just "sounds troubling the auditory sense and being transmited"
and "when we are not gathered to what is addressed," reverberations literally "go in one ear and out the other" (65). Although science and technology can find much utility and avenues for inquiry by demonstrating "that periodic oscillations in air pressure of a certain frequency are experienced as tones...only specialists in the physiology of the senses" can follow these itineraries as they continue to narrow their focus. Still, hearing "concerns everyone directly," which is why Heidegger's repeated phrase "proper hearing" is here connected to "paying thoughtful attention to simple things," not specialized research. Running a trope of reversal, and in doing so, switching the sequence of cause and effect we moderns often elaborate around hearing and our apparatus of sensing sounds, Heidegger insists that "we do not hear because we have ears. We have ears....because we hear." Going further, Heidegger amplifies/accelerates this reversal. Sampling the common prhase "all ears" often used to signify the gathering-saying-hearkening complex of listening, really "tuning in," Heidegger paints a synecdochal image of part becoming the whole reminiscent of Encosmic Hearer a Robert Yarber painting featuring a subject sprouting ears all over: "we are all ears when our gathering devotes itself entirely to hearkening, the ears and the mere invasion of sounds being completely forgotten" (66).
Encosmic Hearer, Robert Yarber
Crucially, "Heraclitus begins the saying with the rejection of hearing as nothing but the passion of the ears," and this nay-saying gets to the "saying" that gathers and is gathered, i.e. "proper" hearing, calls to mind the Upanisadic neti-neti "not this, not this" negations and the repetitio and pedagogical tool of no ("no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no dharmas" etc), the pedagogical tool that structures Mahayana Prajnaparamita sutras (which begin \"Thus I have heard....) and bewilders listeners eager to take preliminary matters for the whole and end of the historical Buddha's prescriptions. Fragment 50 B insists that when you have listened, but "not to me," not to the historical author Heraclitus, this opens up a "reference to proper hearing" (67). This proper hearing belongs to the Logos, but Heidegger asks, "What happens, when such hearing occurs?"
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